Sebastian Vettel and Kimi Raikkonen were first and second respectively come the end of Friday’s second practice in Monza. The German took his Ferrari round in a best time of 1’21”105, while the Finn posted a 1’21”375. Both drivers ran the Soft and Supersoft compounds. Final free practice takes place at 12:00 tomorrow, before the stage is set for qualifying at 15:00.

Seb and Kimi get through a mixed first day of practice

The sun and heat of Thursday gave way to heavy clouds and bursts of rain for the first day of practice at the Autodromo di Monza. In the first session, Scuderia Ferrari’s Kimi Raikkonen braved the weather to post a total of 28 laps on the Intermediate tyres, while his teammate Sebastian Vettel only managed four laps, before a small issue with his spare gearbox put an end to his session. In the afternoon session, though, Seb set the best time ahead of Kimi on a dry track.

“Today it’s been a mixed day”, Seb commented “as the morning session didn’t go smoothly, but in the afternoon it got better. The balance of the car is not perfect yet, but I believe we can work on it for tomorrow as the car seems to be working well. This morning we had a little problem with the car; I wanted to run, but we had to check the gearbox first. However, it was good we could run in the afternoon. In P2 I slid off at Parabolica, but I managed to avoid touching the barrier, but I had just one slight nudge and came away with minor damage to the rear wing which had to be replaced. Apart from that, the car was fine. I am not entirely happy yet, but I know we can still improve because our car has big potential. I think we can do better tomorrow as the package is good, so we’ll see. We’ll keep doing our homework”.

“This morning” Kimi said “the session was held in the wet and we could only do a little running, but in the second practice, track conditions were back to normal. The conditions were the same for everybody, we cannot change the weather; I think that in the end we were quite lucky to have at least one session in the dry. Both compounds were ok, but obviously we did not do much mileage today. We are on yet another different track, so we obviously had some things to fine tune today, but it was not too bad for the first laps . Now we need to go through things and try to improve a bit for tomorrow”.